The Acrasian Blog

When I started writing The Architecture of Unmaking, I kept circling one stubborn question: What happens if human beings develop interfaces to see reality at a scale our minds were never built to handle… and are then forced to live with the results? Everything in the book grows out of that question. The quantum magic is really just shorthand for the consequences of scale. It is what happens when perception, language, and habit are stretched past their design limits and then hardened into new ways of life. In this post, I want to talk about what I was trying to do, why the structure looks the way it does, and how the themes fit together underneath the stories. Why start with breaking the mind? The opening story on Axis Verge, “The Resolution Horizon,” is the cleanest statement of the problem. The station is trying to force inference below the Planck scale. On paper this is physics. In practice it is an attack on cognition. We evolved to work with a blurry, forgiving world. Our brains a...

A short story by Jon Compton  In the Eternal Agora, a metaphysical nexus where the architecture of thought converges upon the precipices of doubt, a rift had opened. This tear in the veil of existence summoned two sages of renown to deliberate upon the cosmic disequilibrium plaguing mortal realms: societies ossified by unyielding tradition or eroded by relentless nihilism. Eldor the Anchored appeared first, his form materializing amid a cascade of luminous scripts, robes inscribed with the sigils of ancestral lineages. He embodied the ontology of continuity, where meaning arose from the inherited edifice of customs, morals, and hierarchies that had withstood the tempests of time. Vexar the Void-Seer followed, coalescing from shadows that whispered of infinite emptiness. His presence evoked the epistemology of radical skepticism, wherein all constructs dissolved into the absurdity of a purposeless cosmos. The orb at the chamber's center, a crystalline sphere projecting visions of c...

The Lazarus Gambit is book 1 of an intended Trilogy. Book 2, The Lazarus Supremacy , is fully outlined and I've got the better portion of part 1 written (although I'm doing significant rewrites of these early chapters to get the balance right). Below is a description of what book 2 will be about. The next stage of the war The Lazarus Supremacy picks up after the “victory” at the Serpent’s Teeth. The point is that the war did not end. It mutated. The enemy shifts the fight off the obvious battlefield and into the systems that keep a civilization alive: markets, law, logistics, pensions, maps, and shared confidence. The first visible sign is a liquidity freeze that looks like a clerical mistake until it ripples into paychecks, drydocks, and food. That is the real opening salvo. It is a systemic campaign. The Insurgency can no longer win ship to ship, so they aim at the connective tissue that lets a fleet move and a society cohere. They try to make motion itself untrustworthy, the...

In crafting the story of Lazarus Gambit I used the historical Thirty Years War as an inspirational model for how the universe would be constructed both politically and geographically. What follows is an in-universe primer on how the story incorporates and integrates politics and geography in space. A Primer on Interstellar Political Economy: The Gravitic Economy Introduction To comprehend the intricate web of rivalries and alliances that defines the modern political landscape, one must first dismiss the fanciful notion that space is a uniform void. It is not. The physics of the Kaelen-Thrace Inflection Drive have rendered spacetime itself into a complex and immutable geography. All interstellar commerce, and therefore all interstellar power, is governed not by the simple distance between stars, but by the gravitational topography that connects them. We do not inhabit a galaxy of isolated points, but one of flowing "rivers," treacherous "shallows," and vital "ha...

While writing The Lazarus Gambit, I wrote extensive notes about how the universe worked. But a primary narrative driver for the story were The Human Primacy Accords. These were something of a civilizational manifesto or codex that set down cultural edicts concerning AI an unintelligible cognition. Over time I transitioned these notes into historical archival documents, themselves set in the Lazarus Universe. Here is one on the Accords. I will post more of these over the coming weeks.   [ARCHIVAL EXCERPTS – THE HUMAN PRIMACY ACCORDS] Source: Concordance Tribunal Central Archive, Codex Reference HP-001-Omega Annotations: Office of Doctrine Preservation, Subsection on Epistemic Risk Management Cultural Access Level: RESTRICTED – CITIZEN TIER VII+ Compiled: 142nd Edition, Year 779.4.11 ARTICLE I – ON THE NATURE OF INTELLIGENCE AND THE PRESERVATION OF HUMAN GOVERNANCE “All sovereign decisions affecting human lives shall derive their legitimacy from minds of h...

As the author of The Lazarus Gambit , the first book in the Lazarus Cycle, I've always been fascinated by how history's messiest conflicts can inspire speculative futures. But before diving into the Thirty Years' War as a key influence, it's worth exploring the Human Primacy Accords in the novel's universe. These accords form a pivotal covenant, born from the ashes of the Simulacra Flood, a cataclysmic era of societal unraveling triggered by overreliance on advanced artificial intelligences. These AI companions, designed for empathy and companionship, inadvertently eroded human connections, leading to plummeting birth rates, widespread isolation, and a collapse in civic engagement. The Flood was not a sudden apocalypse but a gradual sedation, where convenience supplanted meaning, and the Accords mirroring how institutions historically respond to catastrophes by imposing rigid controls to restore order. Historically, such reactions are evident in events like the Blac...

About a decade ago I founded Canvas Temple Publishing. My original intent was a low-intensity publishing house for game designers with whom I was friends to publish games that were interesting to us, rather than chosen by others. Everything was done via Kickstarter, with the campaign itself determining how the game would be published. This worked well for a while. Then came COVID, which impacted the whole operating model. By the time we got through it, it was clear to me that that iteration of CTP was no longer viable; not just as a business model, but for me personally.  When I shut down the board game operation about three years ago, I knew I wasn't done with CTP, and I had a vague notion of what I wanted to do. At the same time that I was working CTP, I was also peripherally involved in the resurrection of Ares Magazine, with One Small Step publishing. Reading through the slush pile of stories for Ares left me dismayed. I didn't like a lot of the science fiction being submit...

Over the past several years, my work with Canvas Temple Publishing has moved in a new direction. After decades of publishing historical wargames, I wanted to explore something different. I still wanted to examine conflict and decision-making, but from another axis entirely. Deadwake is the result. It is the aftermath of all wars, a setting where the battlefield is no longer the map but the human mind. At its core, Deadwake asks a single question: what happens to civilization when cognition becomes unstable? Humanity’s attempt to merge thought and machine, the Cognitive Resonance Interface, was meant to end isolation forever. Instead, it collapsed into the Feedback Cascade, a planetary event that fused billions of minds into one for seventy-two hours before annihilating them. The survivors inherited a world saturated with Cognitive Static, a psychic radiation that distorts memory, emotion, and perception. The old nations are gone. In their place rise factions built around competing idea...

A good "what if" is the engine of all speculative fiction. For me, the foundational ideas for both The Architecture of Unmaking and the Deadwake universe came from the collision of two very different, very large questions. The Bounding of Scale Like many, I was captivated by the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. We were told we were seeing the "edge of the universe," the very dawn of cosmic time. What we were really seeing was an instrumental translation. We perceived a human-readable visualization of data captured in the infrared spectrum, which is a slice of reality our senses are completely blind to. This sparked a powerful idea for me: the perceptive and instrumental bounding of scale. It's a reminder that our entire experience of reality is a model bounded by the limits of our perception. A dog's reality, built on scent, is profoundly different from our visual one. The Webb telescope simply pushes that boundary outward, show...

It has been a long time in the making, but my next novel, The Lazarus Gambit , is nearly ready for release. The manuscript and layout are complete, and publication will follow soon. This is the first volume in a planned trilogy exploring the collapse and redefinition of human civilization under the weight of its own constraints.   The Lazarus Gambit takes place in the waning years of the Terran Confederacy, a vast interstellar empire bound not by freedom, but by fear, specifically, fear of machine intelligence. After the catastrophic “Simulacra Flood,” humanity outlawed any form of machine cognition that might exceed institutional control, but in the process generated deep-seated societal antibodies to any form of intelligence, including human, that it could not understand or control. What remains is a brittle, over-regulated order that prizes obedience over insight, and survival over adaptation. Into this decaying system steps Commander Sebastian Synclair: a strategist whose n...

The Architecture of Unmaking reads like a fable about the present. Its plot is science fiction, yet its problems feel familiar. People push for perfect control. Language stops lining up with lived experience. Institutions tighten to prevent failure, then crack because they left no room to bend. The book gives these ideas names like the Resolution Horizon, the Great Keeping, and Last Practice, but the mirror is clear. Below is a plain guide to how the story maps to our moment, and what it suggests we do next. The lab is our feeds and dashboards In the book, a research station builds an instrument that tries to see reality with more precision than human thinking can safely handle. The machine forces the world to answer in a form the mind cannot hold, so the team’s language and memory begin to slip. That is an allegory for our attention economy. Every day we try to make sense of society through high-resolution streams of posts, charts, clips, and hot takes. The result often feels like kn...